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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Boy, were they quiet about it! Consider that I’m a news
junkie, that I’m from Wisconsin, and that I care I-suppose-you-could-say
passionately about environmental issues. So why didn’t I know about line 61,
about which the company that operates it says
this:

As part of our ongoing efforts to meet North America’s
needs for reliable and secure transportation of petroleum energy supplies,
Enbridge is expanding the average annual capacity of Line 61 from 560,000
barrels per day (bpd) to 1.2 million bpd.

And
where is that expansion? Check it out:

OK—Enbridge wants to transport over a million barrels of tar
sand oil through Wisconsin every day: Is that a problem?

Regular crude oil is plenty toxic, but the tar sand oils are
an environmental disaster at every level.

Let’s start with the sand that you need to fracture the oil
wells: That sand has to be very fine, and Wisconsin has the fortune or
misfortune to have the largest source of the rock that produces the sand in the
nation. So there was a boom in production of the sand in the last decade or so,
a boom four which the state’s environmental protection agency was completely unprepared.

Hmmm…or was it? According to my lights, it had been very carefully
prepared indeed, and from many angles, and it was prepared to do absolutely
nothing.Why? Well, consider this quote
from the Scientific American, tellingly and heart-breakingly
titled “How
Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy.”

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of
science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of
controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he
has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental
protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on
wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks.
Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus
pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and
proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

So now we have an
explosion of sand mines, and that sand is extremely fine, making it easy for it to
become airborne, and also causing silicosis, which can lead to lung cancer. And
according to one source, 79 percent of air samples in frac sand sites exceed
the levels of silicone established by OSHA. Right—the miners wear masks, but
what do you do about little Billy, five years old and living downwind from a
mine?

So the sand is
bad enough, but the fracturing? Well, first of all, it requires a huge amount
of water, and then produces a correspondingly huge amount of very contaminated sludge, about which nobody knows what to do, so people have been digging
ponds, most of which are leaking. And as you can see in the video below,
wildlife is severely affected, both by drinking it and by—in the case of
birds—being coated in it.

And so what gets
produced? Well, it's tar sand oil, the bulk of which is drilled in Alberta,
Canada, and it's particularly nasty stuff: It can lead to things as minor as a
headache to diseases as lethal as leukemia. So from a public health point of
view, wouldn’t it be logical not to expose as many people as possible to the
oil? Of course, but what have we done? Chosen to ship—either by rail or by
pipeline—the stuff all the way across the country.

Which is precisely
what Enbridge, the largest distributer of natural gas in Canada, and the
operator of—in their words—“the longest crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons
transportation system in the world” does.

How long is that system? Well,
it goes from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery near Chicago, but that’s only
the system in the USA (on different lines of the system, the pipelines cover
1900 miles); in Canada, the figure falls to a little over 1400 miles. So that’s
3300 miles of pipeline for both countries; that’s not bad if you’re piping
water, it’s potentially disastrous if you’re piping oil.

And in fact, it
was either very nearly disastrous or absolutely disastrous, depending on your
point of view, when the pipeline broke on 25 July 2010
near Marshall, Michigan, and began flowing into a creek that fed into the
Kalamazoo river that would later flow into Lake Michigan.

Back up five
years—that’s when, according to an investigation by the National
Traffic and Safety Board, Enbridge first knew that they had problems on
that part of the line, but chose not to, or at least didn’t, act. Why would
they do that? According to one critic-turned-whistleblower, John Bolenbaugh, it
was financially a better deal to let a spill happen, and then have the
insurance company pick up the tab, than it was to do routine maintenance. (As
an aside, the tar sand oil is apparently especially toxic and corrosive on
pipes.)

Nor was that all:
Enbridge decided that the alarms were false, due to a bubble in the pipeline, so the solution?
Instead of shutting down, they increased the pressure on the line, so
that when finally, after 17 hours, they realized they had a leak, 81 percent of
the amount spilled occurred in those 17 hours.

That was because the boys in the monitoring
station were in Edmonton, Canada, and not smelling what the boys fishing down
by the river were smelling, which was very strong indeed. Oh, and they were
also getting headaches….

How bad was it?
The worst inland spill in the country, nor was that all, because it
turns out that tar sand oil reacts differently in water than crude oil. Crude
oil stays on the surface and is relatively easy to collect: We were in uncharted seas with tar sand oil. So we had to learn that tar sand oil initially
stays on the surface, releases hydrocarbons such as benzene, and then sinks to
the sea or river floor, and what to do with that?

Ah, for the days
of American ingenuity! Because I would love to have read, as I now will love to
write, “Enbridge’s expert team of haz-mat professions instantly realized and
conceived a special vacuuming process (since patented) that scoured each
millimeter of the river bed, collected any trace of oil or other chemicals,
transferred it to custom-made tanks, which were then taken to a disaster
response center, which had rockets ready in order to shoot the hazardous
material into space, to incinerate the material as well as the rocket itself
outside of the fragile tissue of our precious atmosphere. At Enbridge, we
care!”

No, that wasn’t
the sentence (run-on intended, all the better to obfuscate and lull you into
passivity) that got written.Instead,
Enbridge pretty much told the EPA what they were going to do, which is why I
could view in one video the fascinating spectacle of the side of the boat, the
oil-drenched river, and the hand reaching down to clean up this toxic mess
with…

…a paper towel!

Guys? That’s
something I’d do!

Well, they got
more clever as time went on. According to whistle-blower Bolenbaugh, they
scooped up whatever was visible, took it to a field, dumped in out, pulled
layers of burlap or canvas or whatever, put a topping of soil on that, and then
seeded it. Viola! Instant meadow—just don’t dig to deep.

Or stir the
riverbed too much, since, as the videos make clear, you’ll get a plume of oily
who-knows-what floating down the river. So they poured in rocks, then sand,
and…

This was too much
for even the EPA, which ordered further dredging. It
was all bad enough for the director of the
NTSB, Deborah Hersman, to say that Enbridge officials acted, “like the
Keystone cops.”

Unless, of
course, you were the whistle-blower, who got the ax the very morning after he
blew the whistle, and then started getting death threats. All of which were
freaking him out enough to start putting videos of his motorcycle with two
screws missing on the front tire, and his neighbor opining that those screws
were designed never to come out.

Full
disclosure—yes, he looks nuts. But remember that old adage that even paranoiacs
have enemies? It’s all on his website: you judge.

Nor was the
public unaffected, and Bolenbaugh got all of that on camera, too, and
pretty compelling it is, especially if you have never seen a person having a seizure.
I have, and if the video’s is an act, I hope it wins the Oscar.

Nor was it the
case that you had to be sick to get Enbridge’s attention, you had to be sick in
the right location, which meant that unless you had the river passing through
your living room—right, I know I should edit that out, but watch the videos,
and you’ll get steamed, too—well, you were probably a malingerer or hoping for
a handout.

Apparently, it
was all so bad that Enbridge had to buy 134 houses. The catch? Well, they got
them at fire sale prices, cleaned up their mess (maybe) and then sold at a
higher price. So says—of course—the whistleblower.

The videos are
wrenching in part because of the constant complaint, which I find utterly true,
that “they don’t care”—with the “they” being Enbridge. To which I would reply
that of course they don’t care, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Why? Because
corporations don’t care until it’s too expensive not to care, which is why we have
regulatory bodies like the EPA and the NTSB that have enough teeth to gnash the
corporation into shreds and fed it to their cubs, and then loll in the sun,
looking at the bones and the carnage. Then—trust me—the corporations will care.

So it was a disaster,
a disaster of over one million US gallons of extremely toxic muck spilled that
got into the creek and then into the river, and almost—though who knows, maybe
it did—got into Lake Michigan. Which is connected, you do remember from 5th
grade geography, to all of the other Great Lakes, and which are scenic, yes,
but also provide a lot of water for however-many-millions to drink.

One final irony:
Everybody is reporting seriously that they “closed” the river, which I found
curious, because I have seen rivers, including the mighty Mississippi,
and it was very much my impression that a river flowed, so had someone found
the faucet handle that could turn off a river? If so, not doing so was criminal
negligence when we had all that flooding five or ten years ago. But no, closing
a river simply meant that humans could not swim or boat or even go near it. But
what about fish and wildlife? You know the answer.

A long piece, I
know. But Enbridge, this Enbridge, this fair country—sorry, company—is the very
company that wants to “upgrade” the pipeline so that one million barrels will
pass through…. OK—I think I did the math, which was to figure out that a barrel
contains 31.5 US gallons, multiply that by 1,000,000 (barrels per day), divide
by 24 (hours per day) and then get the figure of 1,312, 500 (gallons per hour).
And that means? That we could have a spill as bad as Michigan’s in under an
hour. A spill in Wisconsin, my home state.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

“An informed citizenry is necessary to maintain a democracy,
so you don’t have a choice. Your responsibility is to keep yourself informed.”

My students, by and large, loved me: They rarely, however,
took me seriously. There was the time that I argued for ride sharing and car
pools, but this, of course, was impossible, since what would happen if their
child took sick, and needed to be taken from school?

“It’s precisely for you children, and their future, that you
should give up your car!”

So the students continued driving to work, and listening to
local radio, most of which were addressing the vital issues of what local star Maripily was currently
up to, or speculating on what person infected local model La
Taína with HIV.

But there were two or three subjects guaranteed to stir
discussion: There was the fact that virtually everyone was scrambling to send
their kids to private schools, since what happens when the teacher is sick?
Well, they’re sent home, if there’s a home to be sent to, since most of the
parents were working. So that means that the kids were on the street, and that
was where you didn’t want them.

A sort of Stockholm Syndrome had overtaken them, those good
students of mine, since how could they simply shrug, pay five or six thousand a
year to a private school, all the while driving past a “free” public school?
“Free” in quotes since they were paying for it via taxes. Shouldn’t they be
pounding on the principal’s desk, demanding that he or she get a substitute
teacher?

“I’d be shouting that if anything happened to my kids while
they were out on the streets, I’d sue the pants off him or her,” I used to say.
But no, there was no system of substitutes in Puerto Rico? Why? Well, there
just wasn’t.

Nor was it the case that the principals were shouting, since
for years I took the bus to Rio Piedras, home of the University of Puerto Rico,
and went to the center of the city to take a bus to Caguas. Fine, but I had to
leap over a drain that was spewing sewage, and had been doing so for months.
The drain was immediately in front Hawthorne School, but where was the good New
England outrage? Where were the parents, and where was the principal?

“Son todos pillos,”
they’re all thieves, said my students of the politicians.

“Then it’s our responsibility to elect politicians who are
honest,” I would say.

More shrugs!

We all accepted it—the government was never meant to provide
services, it was meant to provide jobs to all of our relatives when the party
they supported was in power. Right—if we were part of the ruling / technocrat
class, the government was meant to be a siphon for kickbacks and corruption
schemes. So everybody had a story about their father or mother, laboring
fiercely in whatever government agency it happened to be, but the three or four
people around them? Hah, just sitting on their….

So the government got huge, and that meant unwieldy, and
nobody objected when there were three or four agencies doing or more like not doing the same thing. So in my
infant years in Puerto Rico, I would ask Mr. Fernández stupid questions, like…

“So why does Puerto Rico have twice as many people as
Wisconsin on the government payroll, even though Wisconsin has—roughly—twice as
many people? Oh, and it’s a lot larger….”

Mr. Fernández would sigh….

So the government borrowed for years, and then the winds of
the coming crisis began to be felt, and what was our response to that? ¡Qué paguen los ricos! Or Let the rich
pay, but tell me, somebody, who are the rich? I had breakfast with a Cuban guy
who came here at age 8, started his company, which now employs 200 people, and
so is he “un rico?” You bet, but why
should he pay? If a Cuban is providing jobs to 200 Puerto Ricans, well,
shouldn’t we be thanking him and not sticking it to him?

So the last time we went to the bond market, didn’t we know
perfectly well what we were doing? Bonds usually yield a 3 percent interest,
ours were going for nine to ten. Why was that? Because they were high-risk, and
that was the only was to sell them. And who buys high risk? Hedge funds, and
their nastier cousins, the vulture funds.

If capitalism courses through your veins, you would point
out that the vulture funds do what vultures do in the woods: clear out the dead
and rotting flesh. Those of a more liberal bent would say that, well, usury is
usury.

So hedge funds make up about half of our holders of debt,
but the other half? Retirees, 401K contributors, and in the fight between the
hedge funds and the ordinary investor, guess who comes into the ring fifty pounds
heavier, and fifty fights more experienced? Which is why, of course, they
forced us to promise various things—like any litigation be done in New York,
not San Juan, and …oh, wasn’t there something about paying them first?

So it’s going to be long and messy, because the only sure
thing is that the lawyers will have a merry day ahead, since there’s no orderly
was to get out of this situation, which means that everything will get into the
courts, and then have to be appealed.

Yes, long and messy, but who ultimately bears the
responsibility? Isn’t blaming the vulture funds like blaming the pusher for
your cocaine addiction? Yes, the cabotage laws that require us to use on US
flagged cargo ships are unfair…but wait, are they? Caribbean Business doesn’t think
so, and here’s
the link. And yes, The Walmarts and Walgreen’s are the dandelions on our
economic lawn, but do you do your shopping at Colmado Morales?

And certainly the United States hasn’t bothered to do
anything about our political status, and so for 115 years or so, we’ve been a
colony. But we’re here in the Caribbean, and we’re surrounded by former
colonies from Trinidad / Tobago up to Cuba. So why has Puerto Rico not done
through peaceful or violent means what all the other islands have done? Is it
really up to the US to figure out what to do with us? Trust me, if the answer
is yes, and statehood were imposed, well, as a gringo, I think I’d stay home that day. OK—month.

And now, we have only 40% of the population working, the
rest being subsidized with food stamps and housing and the government health
card. Most of it coming from the feds, and isn’t it time to say that the
colonial relationship between the Congo and Belgium is hardly the same as ours
with the US? Or is that pitiyankee?

V. S. Naipaul once wrote, if I remember correctly, that the
tragedy of the Caribbean islands is that they never developed a national idea
of what they represented, of their purpose or mission in the world. We are,
most of us, descended from slaves or pirates, and how far have we
travelled?

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!